Employment Figures

The PRESIDENT: The honourable, gallant and sometimes stoic Mr McLachlan.

The Hon. A.L. McLACHLAN (14:43): I appreciate your great interest in my 'charactergorisation'. I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills a question regarding underemployment in South Australia.

Leave granted.

The Hon. A.L. McLACHLAN: Earlier this year, the South Australian Centre for Economic Studies reported on a statistic of labour force underemployment within Australia and, in particular, South Australia. The labour force underemployment rate is a measure of unused labour in the workforce. The underemployment rate is calculated using the number of part-time workers willing or able to work more hours and the number of people employed full-time who did not work full-time hours in the week and is expressed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics as a percentage of the labour force.

The study revealed that according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the South Australian under-employment rate has been consistently higher than the Australian rate. My question to the minister is: will the minister provide an explanation as to why the levels of under-employment in South Australia have been consistently higher than the Australian rate; and are there any measures the government is undertaking specifically designed to address this situation?

The Hon. G.E. GAGO (Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills, Minister for Science and Information Economy, Minister for the Status of Women, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (14:44): I thank the honourable member for his question. Indeed, under-employment is an issue for us. I have been particularly interested in under-employment from women's point of view. I know that it is particularly an issue for women, and there are a number of initiatives that we have been involved in to address those sorts of issues—things like trying to improve workplace flexibility, and there is work that we have been doing with a program underway in our public sector at present that is about looking at improving that workplace flexibility. That not only addresses issues for women but it is also available for men as well.

Recent reports have shown that by improving workplace flexibility you can increase productivity significantly and reduce recruitment costs considerably as well. I cannot remember the exact figures but I was reading about a program which improved the retention rate of women by about 40 per cent, or something in that vicinity, but I was even more surprised that it increased it for men by about 20 per cent. So these things are about offering all employees that have caring responsibilities, in particular opportunities to be more flexible around the way they work.

Of course that is a very challenging area. We need to have a very close look and challenge workplace design and practices and invest a lot of work in particularly HR, but more than that it is also changing workplace culture and their attitudes to flexible workplace arrangements. I know that this government has looked at it closely in respect of our Public Service Act 2009, and we incorporated in that act really a provision or entitlement, if you like, for public sector workers here in South Australia, a commitment to enable them to access more flexible workplace arrangements. Although that provision had been in place for a while, when I actually looked at the figures, there were very few people accessing those provisions.

When we looked into it and started talking with staff, there were some HR issues around that but a lot of women were saying, 'Well, sure the provision is there but to avail yourself of it, and to be working from home and not being there late at night in the office, and all those other old fashioned measures of commitment to your job —if you avail yourself of workplace flexible arrangements it is like the kiss of death to your career because it is seen as you putting your children before your job, for instance.'

So we had to really then sit down and look at ways that we could challenge those really ingrained workplace culture attitudes as well. So that is a good example of one area where we have been working very hard to combat underemployment.